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A website accused of perpetrating over four million cyber-attacks across the globe, including attempts to crash banks in the UK, has been taken down in a major international investigation.

The operation, which involved the UK's National Crime Agency, blocked Webstresser.org, which allows criminals to buy attacks on businesses.

The website was used by a British suspect to launch attacks on high street banks last year, causing hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage.

Six suspected members of the gang behind the site have been arrested, with computers seized in the UK, Holland and elsewhere.

The site targeted in this week's operation was one of many operating openly on the web as a "stresser" business, offering to test a company's cyber-defences.

Investigators revealed that the criminal syndicate sold cyber-attacks for as little as $14.99 (almost £11), meaning that anyone who wanted to attack a web service could do so with little chance of being traced.

Webstresser offered a form of cyber-attack known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), in which a target website is overwhelmed by requests for access.

In practice, this means that the target, be they an online bank or a secondary school's portal for students, can seize up and crash, unless the attack is blocked.

Stresses are also used to settle scores between business rivals, carry out industrial espionage or to hold businesses to ransom.

Identifying how the attack is being launched and where it is emanating from requires huge amounts of effort, as specialist online investigators must hunt for the source of the crippling data.

On Wednesday morning, Dutch police completed the operation by identifying the location of the website's servers and seizing them, replacing the site with a page announcing that law enforcement agencies had taken the service offline.

 

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